The Ocean Wireless Boys and the Lost Liner

CHAPTER XXXVIII – A BOLT FROM THE BLUE

All the way back to the ship the girl sat silent, with bowed head buried in her slender white hands. Jarrold, tied and harmless, on the floor of the boat, raved and swore incoherently. Not till she stood once more on the deck of the Tropic Queen, however, did the girl give way. Then as she saw her uncle, sullen and defiant now, led to the captain’s cabin where he was to be questioned, she reeled and would have fallen had not De Garros, who happened to be close at hand, caught her.

The sudden stopping of the ship had awakened most of the passengers and they had come on deck to see what was the matter.

“Here, take her below,” said De Garros to a stewardess, as the passengers crowded curiously around.

The ship was once more got under way, the boat lashed home and the voyage resumed, while in the captain’s cabin, facing Colonel Minturn, the wretched Jarrold told his story. But he expressed no sorrow, except for the failure of his mission. Captain McDonald ordered him confined in a cabin, to be turned over to the U. S. authorities when the ship reached Panama.

The sentence had hardly been executed, when a shuddering, jarring crash shook the ship.

Her way was checked abruptly and every plate and rivet in her steel fabric groaned.

Jack was thrown from his chair in the wireless room and hurled against a steel brace. He struck his head and fell unconscious to the floor.

For an instant following the shock, all was absolute silence. Then bedlam broke loose. Hoarse voices could be heard shouting orders, and the answering yells of the crew came roaring back. Women were screaming somewhere below, and men passengers were trying in vain to quiet them.

Sam was hurled out of his bunk, and, rudely awakened, found Jack lying stunned on the floor. He dashed some water over him and then ran to the bridge. Captain McDonald, firm and inflexible, stood there giving orders as calmly as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

“Shall I send out an S. O. S., sir?” asked Sam, striving to keep as cool as the ship’s commander.

“Not yet. I have not a full report of the extent of the injury to the ship,” was the reply. “First reports indicate that we have struck a submerged derelict.”

But as Sam went back to the wireless room, he saw the boats’ crews all standing by and every preparation being made for abandoning the ship. In an instinctive way, he felt that she had been mortally injured. She was still moving, but slowly, like a wounded thing dragging itself along.

The first officer came hurrying along the deck and shoved his head into the door.

“You had better try to raise any ship within our zone as fast as you can,” he said.

“You are going to send the passengers off?” asked Sam.

“Yes, as a measure of precaution. The derelict we struck has torn a big hole in the engine room. It is impossible to say how long we can keep afloat.”

He hurried off. Sam heard a groan and saw Jack rising on an elbow.

“What is it? What’s up?” he asked bewilderedly, and then: “Oh, I remember now. Any orders for an S. O. S., Sam?”

“Not yet. But we’re to raise any ship we can. They are sending the passengers off in the boats.”

“Wow! That was a crack I got when she struck,” said Jack, getting on his feet. “What did we hit, did you hear?”

“A submerged derelict. It has torn a big hole in the engine room.”

Jack took the key from Sam and began pounding it. But an exclamation of dismay spread over his face as he did so.

“No juice!” he exclaimed. “Or not enough to amount to anything. Here’s a fine fix.”

Below them, as they stood facing each other, thunderstruck at this disaster, every light on the ship went out.

“Dynamos out of business,” gasped Jack. He struck a match and lighted a lamp that hung in “gimbals” on the bulkhead.

They could hear the sharp staccato commands of the ship’s officers as they quelled the incipient panic that had followed the extinguishing of the lights. The boats were being filled and sent away with quiet and orderly precision, a boatswain or a quartermaster in each one. The higher officers could not leave the ship till later, by the law of the sea.

Everything moved quietly, almost silently. It was like watching a dream picture, Jack thought afterward. Luckily, the moon was bright and gave ample light for the disembarking of the passengers. It was just this, the bright moonlight, the cloudless sky and the smooth, summery sea that made it all seem so unreal. It seemed impossible that a death blow had been dealt to a mighty liner and that her passengers were in peril, on a sea like a millpond and under an unruffled sky.

Jack hastened forward to report the failure of the current, without which not a message of appeal could be flung abroad. The captain received the news without the flicker of an eyelid.

“At any rate, the passengers are all safe,” he said, “the boats are all off. Each has plenty of provisions and water and is in charge of a competent man. We are in for a long spell of fine weather and the coast is not far off. At the worst it will be a sea adventure for them with few discomforts.”

“Are you going to abandon the ship, sir?” asked Jack respectfully.

“No. My duty is to stay by her as long as I think there is a chance of saving her. The report from the engine room is that she can be run several miles yet before the water reaches the boilers. All the pumps are at work, full force, and that is the reason there is no power left for the dynamos.”

“Do you mean you are going to try to beach her, sir?” inquired Jack.

“If I can possibly do so,” was the reply. “There is an island not far to the south of here called Castle Island. If I can reach it in time and beach her, there may be one chance in a thousand of salving her, after all.”

Jack had asked all the questions he dared. Had it not been a time of such stress, he would not have ventured to ask so many.

He hurried back to the wireless room. Sam was busy at the key, but he shook his head in reply to Jack’s inquiring glance.

“Nothing doing,” he said. “Any news forward?”

“Yes. All the passengers are off and there are now on board only the officers and crew. The skipper means to run for an island called Castle Island and beach her there. He thinks that later there may be a chance of getting her hull off, if he can make it.”

“Then she is leaking fast?”

“Yes, they’ve got all the pumps going to keep the water from getting to the fires. That’s the reason we’ve got no juice.”

“Let’s look up Castle Island,” said Jack, partly to relieve the tenseness of their position as the wounded ship crawled strickenly southward and partly to keep Sam, who was making a plucky effort to fight back his fears, from thinking too much of their situation.

They soon found it – a small island shaped like a splash of gravy on a plate. It was marked with a red dot. Under this red dot, in italics, was written, “Volcano. Probably extinct.”

“Well, any old port in a storm,” remarked Jack, as he closed up the atlas.

CHAPTER XXXIX – JACK’S RADIO

Darkly violet under the light of the dawn-fading stars lay Castle Island. Cradled in the heaving seas it was watched by scores of anxious eyes on the Tropic Queen, now in her death struggle. The fire room crew was kept at work only by physical persuasion. The water was gaining fast now through the jagged wound in the craft’s steel side.

In the soft radiance that precedes the first flush of a tropic dawn, the two young wireless men, their occupation gone, watched its notched skyline grow into more definite shape.

As the light grew stronger, they saw that it was a bigger island than they had supposed. Vast chasms rent the sides of rock-ribbed mountains, and the place looked desolate and barren to a degree. Suddenly, too, Jack became aware of something they had not at first noticed.

From the summit of the rocky apex that topped the island, a smudge of smoke was blurred against the clear sky.

“The volcano!” exclaimed the boys in one breath.

“But I thought it was extinct,” said Sam, in a dismayed voice. The thought of being in the proximity of an active volcano was anything but pleasing to him.